Know Your Lifestyle - Introducing Sustainable Consumption in 2nd-chance education

The final aim of "Know Your Lifestyle - Introducing Sustainable Consumption in 2nd-chance education" project is to make learners acknowledge the link between local personal consumption and the resulting global impact, and thus give young people the opportunity to look critically at their own consumption and to develop alternative courses of action. The project targets young, often underprivileged, adults in second change education and their teachers. New learning materials on sustainable consumption, produced in the framework of Know Your Lifestyle project, were presented at a workshop in Brussels 5-6 February 2015. The workshop gathered around 35 participants interested in learning more about the project's outcomes and sharing their feedback with the project's consortium. At the workshop, the didactic materials for teachers and 2nd chance students were presented by the NGO partners. Participants got the opportunity to work with the materials, to test some of the innovative and creative methods and to discuss and suggest improvements. The main outcomes of this project are the development of teaching materials and training opportunities which will provide teachers with the capacity to deal with development education and globalisation; organisation of activities embedded with the second chance course that will involve the students and creation of curriculums; a network in which experts not only in specific aspects of development politics, but also in development education or global learning get together and exchange methodologies and good practice. Five topics on sustainable consumption The training / teaching materials were built around five topics. It gave background information as well as introduced a variety of methods which could be used to deal with each of them. 1) Handy & Smart Phone focuses on the life cycle of a cellular phone with the topics raw materials production and trade, production, consumption and use as well as recycling. 2) Water as a Global Good deals with the access to and remarkableness of the resource water and points out the all-round function of water as a valuable resource in our day to day life. 3) Global Good Production in Textile Industry informs about the globalisation of production processes by the example of clothing and shows under which circumstances our clothing is produced and which financial and social costs are caused by this production. 4) Human Energy mentions reasons why we should switch from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources and shows options for saving energy and for producing renewable energy. 5) Renewable Energies deals with the relation between the consumption behavior and finiteness of energy and other natural resources and tries to raise the awareness about global interaction and the role of the individual in reducing global problems. Project coordinator: Henrik Poos - dvv international poos@dvv-international.de